Click Consonant - Languages With Clicks

Languages With Clicks

Clicks occur in all three Khoisan language families of southern Africa, where they may be the most numerous consonants. To a lesser extent they are found in two groups of neighbouring Bantu languages which borrowed them, directly or indirectly, from Khoisan. In the southeast, in eastern South Africa, Swaziland, Lesotho, Zimbabwe, and southern Mozambique, they were adopted from a Tuu language or languages by the languages of the Nguni cluster (especially Zulu, Xhosa, and Phuthi, but also to a lesser extent Swazi and Ndebele), and spread from them in a reduced fashion to the Zulu-based pidgin Fanagalo, Sesotho, Tsonga, Ronga, the Mzimba dialect of Tumbuka, and more recently to Ndau and urban varieties of Pedi, where the spread of clicks is an ongoing process. The second point of transfer was near the Caprivi Strip and the Okavango River, where it was apparently the Yeyi language which borrowed the clicks from a West Kalihari Khoe language, and which in turn passed on a reduced click inventory to the neighboring Mbukushu, Kwangali, Gciriku, Kuhane, and Fwe languages in Angola, Namibia, Botswana, and Zambia.

There are three minority languages in East Africa which use clicks: Sandawe and Hadza of Tanzania, as well as Dahalo, an endangered South Cushitic language of Kenya which has clicks in only a few dozen words. It is thought the latter may remain from an episode of language shift.

The only non-African language known to employ clicks as regular speech sounds is Damin, a ritual code used by speakers of Lardil in Australia. One of the clicks in Damin is actually an egressive click, using the tongue to compress the air in the mouth for an outward (egressive) "spurt".

The Southern African Khoisan languages only utilize root-initial clicks. Hadza, Sandawe, and several of the Bantu languages also allow syllable-initial clicks within roots, but in no language does a click close a syllable or end a word.

Scattered clicks are found in ideophones in other languages, such as Kongo /ᵑǃ/, Mijikenda /ᵑǀ/, and Hadza /ʘ̃ʷ/ (Hadza does not otherwise have labial clicks). Ideophones often utilize phonemic distinctions not found in normal vocabulary.

English and many other languages may use bare clicks in interjections, without the accompaniment of vowels, such as the dental "tsk-tsk" sound used to express disapproval, or the lateral tchick used with horses. In Ningdu Chinese (a Hakka dialect), flapped nasal clicks are used in nursery rhymes. In Persian, Greek, Maltese, Turkic and Levantine Arabic as well as southern Italian dialects such as Sicilian, a bare dental click accompanied by tipping the head upwards signifies "no". Libyan Arabic apparently has three such sounds.

Clicks occasionally turn up elsewhere, as in the special registers twins sometimes develop with each other. In West Africa, clicks have been reported allophonically, and similarly in German, faint clicks have been recorded in rapid speech where the consonants /t/ and /k/ overlap between words.

Occasionally other languages are said to have click sounds. This is usually a misnomer for ejective consonants, which are found across much of the world.